media diet – Page 2 – Jenneral HQ

Effective Civic Action, Inside and Outside the System

I read Teardown by Dave Meslin for a book club here in Ottawa, and it is the weirdest thing that I’ve read in some time. I’ve described it to some friends as the most milquetoast call to radicalism that I’ve ever read. But a more charitable interpretation, perhaps, is that it is a book that excludes all theory to focus single-mindedly on praxis, and how to do it well in the Canadian political context. Meslin has a wealth of experience as an activist, and his book reflects that.

Would I recommend the book? Yes, especially if you’re Canadian. The tactics that he describes does have their limitations, and don’t try to look for any sort of coherent ideology (but again…. pracccssisssss is where the book shines), but there are enough nuggets of wisdom to mine that I think it’s likely worth your time overall.

I took lots of notes during my read-through, but of course focused on the chapters that are most useful and insightful for me personally. Key takeaways:

Useful ideas for local planning/advocacy:

4 rules to create engaging public notices: be pretty, highlight important info, highlight engagement opportunities, finish with a call for action: “Your voice matters.” “This is your chance to be heard.” “We want your opinion.”
Use less planning jargon. Specifically called out examples: “podium”, “mechanical penthouse”, “below grade”, “amenity space” (be more specific – what’s going in that amenity space?)
City hall should have open doors (literally), council chambers should have open doors (literally).
Dress codes should be loosened, requiring ties in 2019 is ludicrous
Spontaneous consultation meetings on transit buses, giving free bus tickets as incentive
Providing pizza to citizens who want to host informal focus groups in their own homes
Interesting awareness campaign idea: put price tags on everything. Fire hydrants, bus stops, playgrounds. Show cost to build and to maintain/operate. Could be in lead-up to public budgeting session.
Paper newsletters in people’s physical mailboxes are still an incredibly powerful way to involve community

A very well thought out section on ways to clean up campaign money and the relative strengths and weaknesses of each solution:

(going in, it should be recognized that governments are already in the habit of giving out rebates, so none of these solutions are like, unrealistically radical)

tax incentives by way of rebates
- Toronto already does this, you get a 75% rebate on all small donations
- One drawback is that since the refund is delayed, you discriminate against lower-income donors.
matching grants
- 1:1 ratio used in presidential primary elections: if you give $50, govt will kick in $50
- 6:1 ratio for first $175 of each contribution in NY program, i.e. govt will give $6 per every $1 you donate – completely changed culture of campaign finance in the city. Before, 30% of popn donated, after introduction in 2009, 90% donated. Jump concentrated in neighbourhoods w higher poverty rates, higher concentrations of minority residents. System credited w electing a much more diverse council. In 2018, ratio raised to 8:1.
per-vote subsidy
- annual allowance given to party based on how many votes they got in the last election.
- introduced in Canada in 2004, each party got flat 1.75/vote in prior election
- all voters (not just the 1% who donate) help direct funds
- strategic voting becomes more meaningful
- honestly a pretty decent option, but they get cancelled and don’t stick around because politicians hate them
democracy dollars
- “bold experiment” in Seattle, each voter is mailed 4 coupons worth $25 each. tripled number of campaign donors; 84% of donors were new to political process, donors were more reflective of general popn (e.g. more donations coming from youth, women, PoC, low-income residents). % funding from small contributions went from under 50% to 87%
- provides candidates large incentive to knock on doors, talk to voters
- amplifies new and emerging voices
- allows all voters, regardless of disposable income, to participate

Misc takes:

In runoff elections, things get friendlier because if you’re nice to another candidate then their supporters might vote for you second
Billboards erode our sense of collective ownership and social identity. Neighbourhoods gain their character from small businesses, public art, local architecture, and historic landmarks. Billboards create a monolithic aesthetic. It’s kind of ridiculous when neighbourhoods allow billboards but don’t allow local postings from actual people.
Disclosure of donations to politicians need to have more information than just a name and address, because that makes it harder to connect the dots between where lobbyists work and what the donate as “private citizens”. But possibly more importantly, we absolutely have to stop releasing them as useless PDFs, and instead release them as actually usable data sets
Lobbying is a good thing, as long as there’s a level playing field. Maybe the government should provide lobbyists to community groups, the same way that courts appoint lawyers to low-income defendants. They can do this by providing direct funding to community orgs that cross a support threshold, or corps can be forced to pay for opposition’s lobbying costs, or govts can create an office of public lobbyists staffed w full-time advocates. (That last one sounds a lot like Davidoff’s advocacy planning which I’m a large fan of)

“War stories”:

Olifas Marketing Group (OMG) offered city council thousands of free garbage cans. In exchange, all OMG wanted was permission to put advertising on the cans. The sign bylaw, of course, doesn’t allow advertising to be installed directly on our sidewalks, so the company was asking for an exemption. But OMG couldn’t simply offer the city millions of dollars in exchange for that exemption. Imagine how that would have looked! The optics would have been terrible because everyone knows that policy shouldn’t be for sale. But because OMG offered “free” street furniture, no one saw it for what it is: a company getting special treatment in exchange for financial incentives. Institutionalized bribery. Under this new financial model, the advertising was more important than the garbage can. So the free bins were themselves pieces of garbage, built with the structural integrity of an empty pop can. They began breaking down as soon as they were installed, metal doors flinging open and blocking the sidewalk or a bike lane. And the bins were often installed perpendicular to the curb, which blocked pedestrians but made the advertising more visible to drivers. These weren’t really garbage cans with ads on them at all; they were billboards with lousy garbage cans attached. (216)

[Toronto] has a donations policy that is explicitly designed to ensure that “donations occur at arm’s length from any City decision-making process.” But “when I filed a complaint with the city’s integrity commissioner, she ruled that no rules were broken because the ten-year-old policy regulating donations and community benefits astonishingly doesn’t include a definition of “donations” or “community benefits.” Without clear terminology, no one can actually break any rules. It’s the wild west. (218)

Tribar created the ultimate bundle: if the city gave permission to install a two-storey television screen above one of North America’s largest urban green spaces, the company would (are you ready for this?) contribute $3.5 million towards the construction of a suicide barrier on the same bridge. When the proposal was presented at city hall, the two items were bundled together, so if you were against the video screens (which I was, of course), then you were portrayed as also being against the suicide barrier. Politically, it was a nightmare situation. And that was intentional. (219)

Groups with charitable status are required to follow strict rules that limit their ability to do advocacy, while non-profit groups (without charitable status) can be much more innovative, politically vocal and effective when it comes to advocacy and community organizing. So why would any group choose to be a charity? Because charitable donations are tax-deductible. Under the existing rules, certain kinds of non-partisan advocacy are permitted, as long they account for less than 10 percent of a charity’s resources. But because board members often don’t understand these rules, they tend to take a risk-averse approach. “We have weak and confused sector organizations,” explains charity law expert Mark Blumberg, who’s calculated that more than 99 percent of charities conduct far fewer political activities than are allowed under the current rules. In fact, Blumberg estimates that the sector as a whole is spending only one-thousandth of its permitted threshold. (248)

When Ford went to rehab for two months, we literally had no mayor. As a community activist, I noticed a big difference during those strange years. Before and after Ford, it was absolutely necessary to secure the support of the mayor’s office in order to get any proposal approved by council. But during the Ford years, I was able to win significant political victories both with and without the mayor’s support. The councillors were in charge—as they should be but rarely are. (276)

Rants I won’t attempt to summarize because they are things of beauty you just kinda had to be there for:

“Tricks of the trade”, how politicians hide things from public eye
The one on billboards
The one on the increasing legibility of campaign running, and especially Get Out the Vote (GOTV)

…Okay, fine, a small quote, because this very specific type of Ra-driven (archive) driven institutional rot is exactly my jam:

“If they don’t trust their own caucus members to serve as ambassadors to the public, can you imagine how terrified they must be of having random volunteers knocking on doors and saying something that might be off message? This leaves campaigns with a dilemma: how do you distract dozens, if not hundreds, of volunteers and make sure they aren’t trying to talk to voters about issues?” (156-157)

Books for Autistic People

So like I said in the last Articles of Interest post, in the spirit of putting my money where my mouth is I’ve spent the last few months reading books on autism, social skills, and coping mechanisms for living with neurotypicals.

So I read around a dozen books in total. I intended to write a short and sweet review paragraph for each, but some of them said some really useful things so I took notes, and then that became a whole thing. In order to not clog up my blog, I’m going to turn this post into more of a directory – click through to read an excerpt, my review, and a summary of useful concepts for my more extensive reviews.

In order of reading:

A Field Guide to Earthlings – Ian Ford

Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder – Sarah Hendrickx

Nonviolent Communication, 2nd ed. – Marshall B. Rosenberg

Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate – Cynthia Kim

Other books I’ve read but weren’t interesting enough to merit a full review

Miscellaneous thoughts

Because I’m insufferable, here is a quote from my boi michel foucault that aptly summarizes the underlying sentiment of the books that I liked the best:

The definition of disease and of the insane, and the classification of the insane has been made in such a way as to exclude from our society a certain number of people… Nobody is more conservative than those people who tell you that the modern world is afflicted by nervous anxiety or schizophrenia. It is in fact a cunning way of excluding certain people or certain patterns of behaviour.

In other words, having trouble coping with the rhythms and patterns specific to our society doesn’t mean that you’re defective as a human being. It means that society has not cared to make in itself a place in itself for you, because sometimes society flat sucks.

This is disability activism in a nutshell, and a good lens for self compassion. If you take nothing else away from this post, take that.

Major kudos to the r/aspergirls wiki, where I sourced many of these books. And once again a huge thanks to @mykola for writing the twitter thread that started it all.

It has also occurred to me during this binge that there are probably decent guidebooks for people who are neurodiverse in other ways as well, and I should probably hunt them down and give them a read. With decent curation, that doesn’t seem like the worst way to discover universal human experiences that I don’t have (perma). Further reviews possibly to come.

Articles of Interest, October-November 2018

Oops, it’s December. Thankfully, this blog is my private property, so I can do things like announce a special double feature, even though what I’m actually doing is just giving you half the content in twice the time. It’s fine, guys. It’s fine.

Some good posts I read in the last two months:

The fantastically named Big Block of Cheese Day dot tumblr dot com on a reasonable comments section on a conservative blog (archive)

While failson men surely do deserve moral blame for not pulling the trigger, there are significant cultural norms that have mutated to make it even more difficult. How many marriages, throughout history, that grew into a state of love and commitment began with a shotgun wedding and a full belly? In a culture where birth control is available, few expect marriage before cohabitation, and sex is free and easy, how much blame are we assigning to the men? Of course they are behaving this way. They are living out what was taught to them.

I wish there was more of this content on the internet. I think a lot of conservatives are rightfully upset at the system and might be in a lot of pain, and while I don’t blame them for lashing out, I can’t understand them when they do that. Recently though, I’ve found a handful of good right-leaning sources.

American Affairs Journal, which I might have linked in a previous articles post consistently serves up really good, intelligent #discourse, and I’m honestly pretty surprised that they consider themselves right of centre. Ozy, who is a very smart, lefty feminist, also has a list here of content creators that I will check out eventually.

This piece on how quietly radical The Little Mermaid is (archive)

There is a reason the destruction of Ariel’s grotto harrowed me more as a child than any other scene in a Disney film. I could hardly watch it. I hid my face. I begged my family to skip scene. I was reduced to a sobbing mess. On a personal level, it harrowed me more than the destruction of Cinderella’s dress.

That reason is because, in watching the scene, I felt the pain of a place of refuge being invaded. By the time we reach the destruction of the grotto, we are as emotionally invested in Ariel’s collection as she is because we see that the objects are more than objects. They are extensions of herself, encapsulating all her feelings of hope and hopelessness.

Destroying those items is like annihilating a part of her soul.

That is why I hate the “she gave up her voice for a man” line of thought so much. Because it so blatantly disregards the context of the film. Because it paints Ariel as a shallow teenager. Because it places blame for what follows solely on Ariel’s shoulders and absolves Triton of any wrongdoing.

Auuuurgh I love it I love it I love it. It’s kind of really messed up that a lot of Disney Princesses movies are actually quite radical, but because they are marketed towards girls, lots of people tend to automatically dismiss them and assume that they’re just about “getting the guy” etc. It actually seems like Disney itself has started doing this recently, as point out by this piece that actually made the shortlist for this post. Of course that isn’t too
surprising, unfortunately many examples of a franchise “selling out” exist. Here is a piece on something similar happening in Star Trek as well. One place, conversely, where this definitely DID NOT happen is Star Wars. I will fight you on this. I don’t even like Star Wars that much but I’ll put em up. TLJ has stuck to its roots so hard and I love Rey and Finn and Poe forever. Now, you won’t ever catch me ousside because I don’t go outside, but I am Extremely Logged On and, like, the sidebar tells u like 5 ways that u can reach me by right there. Let’s start dukin it out on LinkedIn. See if I care. I don’t, unless you’re talking smack about TLJ. Let’s move on before I embarrass myself further.

This Wired piece, which confidently proclaims that [thing that I have never heard of] is “synonymous with online communication in its best, worst, and, above all, most vital forms.”

…I won’t blame Wired for being out of touch though. It’s just that the piece was written in 1997.

To be on The Well in 1985 was, even in the technically hip Bay area, to be that rare person for whom a modem was just another tool. Owning one that transmitted data at 1,200 bits per second put you on the cutting edge. The Macintosh had 128K of memory and no hard drive. Most personal computers were DOS-based. MCI’s email service, MCI Mail, had recently come on the market, but it had nothing to do with bringing people together in groups. The university-centered Arpanet was a closed society whose members had little awareness of what a few people in Sausalito were doing. Moreover, Arpanet—and the Internet that was quickly supplanting it—was an experiment in the technical problems of computer networking itself. Studying the cultural effects of bringing people together online wasn’t on Arpa’s agenda. Small BBSes were around, but they had about them the whiff of a lonely nerd’s hangout. Although The Well had no shortage of shy Unix hackers, something about it felt different.

So many of the features described here, and the way that the container shapes the culture of the place, and the drama that played out, are things that I’ve seen shades of during my decade on the internet. It’s mid-December and Tumblr is going to start banning blogs in five days. I realize that the reason I stagger these is so that I can look at the pieces with clear eyes, emotionally removed from the heated argument of the day. But this piece is 20 years old, and there’s too much for me to talk about here. People who I’ve followed for years and years are moving off, and my community is preparing to scatter. There’s a chance that this all blows over and things don’t end immediately, but that doesn’t matter. The death spiral has begun, and whether it takes two months or two years, everyone’s going to leave.

There won’t be anything like Tumblr when it’s gone, because of the way that it was built. Even if the community remains the same, the content will change. This was true when people moved from LiveJournal to Tumblr in 07 and after en masse, and it is true now. The Well, and the way that it was described, reminds me a little of Tumblr, and 4Chan, and Discord, with fainter shades of everything else. But there will never be anything exactly like The Well ever again, specifically because of the hard limitations then that can only ever by artificially imposed now.

But like the way The Well left ripples in internet culture, Tumblr will do the same. And everything will change, and everything will stay the same, and the children of gen Z will stumble across an epitaph of Tumblr, written in 2023, and will have these realizations too. So it goes.

This piece on rape culture, also from 20 years ago but unfortunately evergreen

All acts of violence that change our lives are also acts of betrayal. Rape is betrayal. Sexual abuse is betrayal. Finding out that your country is capable of vast atrocities is betrayal. Currently, our cultural vocabulary includes an image of the veteran who, though he may have been through episodic fragmentation, has come out stronger and, perhaps, more fully human. We have no such images for raped women. We don’t ever expect them to feel safe without a concerted mental effort and a protected environment. Logic alone would dictate that people who have been under fire and seen people blown to bits would have issues of safety as intense as people who were raped or abused, but we still judge their capability by separate standards. While some of that bias can be chalked up to old stereotypes that call men tough and women sensitive, that doesn’t account for all of it. Both rape and war involve traumatic violence. In recent years, feminists have fought hard to portray rape as an act of violence and not lust. While this has been necessary and difficult, it is somewhat misguided. The real problem is not that we treat rape as sex, but that we treat it as theft.

Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines rape as forced sex and also plunder—”robbing or despoiling,“ to be exact. Therefore, a raped woman is the victim of theft. You weren’t just violated, we tell her. You were pillaged. Something of intrinsic value was stolen from you. The fervent belief that this is true is evident on all sides of the issue. From traditional cultures that treat a raped woman as bankrupt to progressive movements that speak in terms of “reclaiming” oneself and “owning” the experience, we consistently use the language of theft. We tell a woman loudly and clearly that if she was sexually violated she has been robbed, and that the objects stolen were purity and innocence. With the best of motives, we still say to her, “I’m sorry for your loss.” We will ask her to “reclaim” her experience, rather than realize its effects. The truth is, if you were raped or abused, nothing was stolen from you. The low-life who did it threw his soul in the trash, but yours is intact. As long as we cling to the concept of rape or abuse as theft, we are ultimately led back to the belief that a woman’s worth and sense of self lie in her sexual purity. As long as the artifacts “stolen” are her defining virtues, we can speak of her condition only in terms of ownership and loss. To imply that deep within every woman is something essential that can be seen or touched, a vessel containing the real her that can be stolen by someone else, is an absolute objectification of women.

This piece is angry, and passionate, and says something that I 100% agree with. Activism can never be entirely detached from the culture of its birth, a culture that permeates everything they do. And indeed I’ve seen some shenanigans within the SJ sphere that, “conservative protestantism with a
gay hat” (archive) very, very accurately describes. I would say that activists need to self-crit a lot more, but leftbook has ruined that phrase for me forever, because on there it basically means “I made a wild assumption about your level of privilege based on your Facebook profile, I have concluded from that that you are more privileged than me, and therefore you must defer to my opinion.” Yeah, I know. Leftbook. Worst three months of my life.

Lastly, this piece on the Chinese diaspora in Canada, and why it’s not a given that new immigrants vote left.

By being barred from white and English-speaking labour markets, deskilled workers, undocumented workers, and migrants who don’t speak English are often forced into industries and sectors where regulations are weak and worker protections are low. Take, for example, the issue of wage theft: in a 2016 survey of 184 Chinese restaurant workers in the GTA, 43 per cent reported being paid below minimum wage. In one widely publicized incident, it was found that Regal Restaurants had stolen wages totaling more than $650,000 from over 60 Chinese restaurant workers in the GTA.

It is precisely the working-class and deskilled immigrant experiences that the right-wing operatives have tapped into, asking loaded questions like, “Is it fair that you worked so hard through all those poor jobs, just to pay taxes to support these ‘fake’ and morally questionable refugees?” These ideologies, when unopposed, move working-class people away from developing class consciousness and identifying their true oppressors.

Sadly, the left has often been uninvested in the struggles of Chinese and other racialized working-class immigrants. Some NDP campaigners told us they were instructed to avoid canvassing in Chinese communities in the lead-up to the recent elections, as it was assumed that Chinese Canadians would not be interested in left-wing demands. Based on these racialized assumptions, one NDP canvasser told us they expected “people to slam their doors in my face.” Instead, the canvasser discovered that when they actually spoke to residents in their language, “most [residents] found the NDP’s policies agreeable.” It was the lack of sustained political education, organizational power, and leftist Chinese media long before the 2018 election that ultimately meant many of these neighbourhoods voted for Progressive Conservatives.

I had such a hard time finding a short passage to excerpt, guys. I wanted to copy paste the entire thing. It’s a great primer into the Chinese diaspora in Canada. It talks about the death of Asian-American activism in the 70s, and how the ripple effects of that led to the PC party being able to tap into the racism that Chinese people continue to face, and why they voted overwhelmingly for the Fords, Rob and Doug. How the Liberals declawed them, and how much the NDP dropped the ball. And sweet Jesus, the amount of fake news that gets circulated around on WeChat. If you’re Chinese, and even if you’re not, you need to give this a read. I can’t believe I’m just finding out now about Briarpatch mag, because they. Are. Amazing!!!!!

At the same time, reading this piece makes me kind of melancholy. It kind of sucks that I’m unable to talk about this with the people that I want to the most: my parents. My Chinese is getting more broken by the day and it wasn’t too good to start with, because I moved here when I was six. There’s basically zero chance that I can get it to a level where I can talk about complex topics with my parents. I wonder how they feel, too, about having an adult daughter who has never had an intelligent conversation with them, who they have to keep simplifying their words for.